Installation view, Tate Gallery Liverpool
Installation - dimensions variable
x3 video tapes; stereo sound; x3 synchronised VTRs; x3 video projectors; x3 large projection screens forming a panorama
duration of video/sound element: 15 minutes
Video/sound element available for Exhibition - email: admin AT brighter DOT org
Installation view, Tate Gallery Liverpool
The Conditions was first shown as an installation: constructions, special lighting, and OHP projections transforming a large space in Liverpool's Tate Gallery into the viewing room for a panoramic video/sound presentation. The work is essentially a 3-screen/3-tape video projection with stereo sound and functions best in a fully blacked-out 'viewing theatre' with good sound isolation.
The work is concerned with the altered status of natural phenomena as they become part of a scientific canon: a realm of the senses becoming divided into the many kingdoms of the specialists. This is an on-going historical process, leaving in its wake discarded theories, hypotheses, and representations which come to be seen as erroneous or aberrant.
The 15-minute projected video panorama, constituted from 3 synchronised VTR/projector units, is presented in separately titled sections. These titles reference early systems for classifying natural forces and elements, such as the Aristotelian elements of earth, water, air and fire; and the four humors of Galenic medicine - blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile, and their associated qualities of hot, cold, wet and dry. Working with systems like these medieval alchemists combined mysticism and allegory with a new enthusiasm for observational evidence. Underlying The Conditions is the idea that outdated models of reality can remain highly seductive, even as their analytical value wanes with technical and cultural progress.
There is a constant tension and interplay between sensual imagery: fluids, luxuriant flowers, honeycombs, the body; and the formalising effects of staging and presentation: the frame, the triptych, the synchronisation of parallel time-lines. The struggle to present 'one picture' from three separate machines is intrinsic to the work. The linkage of elements across the boundaries of the three screens is at times visually immaculate, whilst at other times slippage occurs between the three sections, suggesting the imminent fragmentation of the panorama into free-running parts.
Sound plays a significant role in The Conditions, both in extending the spatial reach of the work, and as a carrier of meaning. The soundtrack is formed around the notion of a music in which may be detected fundamental factors like metals, air, or mechanical time: the creaking of bellows pumping air through a crude reed-organ; church bells dissolving into a non-rhythmic metallic drone; clockwork mechanisms offset against the rushing of fluids or the teeming of a beehive.
The opening section of The Conditions abbreviates the cosmology of the 17th-century English philosopher Robert Fludd 1 in a series of slow dissolves on the centre screen. Keeping within the religious orthodoxy of his time, Fludd's cosmology depends on a prime-mover bringing light. This act of intervention sets in motion a chain of events and interactions in the realm of matter, where spheres of fire, gas, and liquid permeate each other via comb-like emanations and funnels, until an equilibrium is reached between the elements.
At the beginning of the section, footsteps are heard at the centre of the space. Walking to extreme left and right an invisible character sets in motion two clockwork rhythms which underscore the whole of this introductory section. The footsteps return to the centre, some way off, from where the sound of a crude pipe-organ is heard. As Fludd's cosmology unfolds on the centre screen, to the left and right of it we see pages of solid, etched darkness captioned et sic infinitum ('and so on to infinity'): Fludd's representation of the cosmos before light. Two ceramic bowls (mortars without pestles) rotate against these backgrounds. Over the duration of the sequence a slow motion stream of milk is drawn up from one bowl, as it simultaneously falls back into the opposite one.
The trick of reverse-motion editing allows this magical transfer of fluid to be demonstrated from one section of video footage replayed simultaneously forwards and backwards. Although it confounds gravity and the normal flow of time, the interplay between each side obeys a fundamental principle: the filling of one bowl is contingent on the emptying of the other; at any one time they represent between them the one single measure of fluid in flux. The adoption of this rule, and the use of light/dark; empty/full polarities is a play on some of the preoccupations of contemporary cosmology.
Big Bang theory requires an explanation for the uneven distribution of detectable matter, such as galaxies, across the universe 2 and awaits the detection of vast amounts of theorised but invisible 'dark matter' to balance its hypotheses. In The Conditions, Fludd's 'empty' infinity is paradoxically represented by a page which is as full of ink as the crude etching plate would allow. In The Conditions visible, light matter - the milk - demonstrates its miraculous properties against the background of this page.
In 1688 Francesco Redi proved that the appearance of maggots in putrefying matter was due to the action of flies, not the spontaneous generation of life in rotting organic material, as previously believed. 3 Redi demonstrated that putrefying meat in sealed jars did not produce maggots whereas samples left uncovered did. When his detractors claimed that spontaneous generation required air, Redi covered the jars with gauze instead and achieved the same result. With this early, exemplary combination of experiment and control experiment, Redi proved a causal link between putrefying matter, flies, and maggots. This section of The Conditions enacts a fantasy of decaying flowers becoming human flesh.
Installation view, Tate Gallery Liverpool
Against a whirling outdoor background a bouquet of bluebells turning on a horizontal axis burns, rots, bleaches white and dissolves away to reveal a monumental, disembodied human arm, rotating inexplicably on the same axis. An accelerating round of cathedral bells becomes n homogenised along with the blue background, becoming an harmonic drone as colour leaches out of the image. In staging a 'miracle' which appears to contradict established fact, the work highlights the persistent, seductive nature of imagined and desired realities.
The sequence also draws on the notion of a centrifuge, by which organic compoundscan be broken down in modern chemistry. The 'essence' remaining here is not only the miraculous arm, but a black and white image. This is the minimum required for defining form in terms of the video signal; the 'shape' on which the colour part of the image rests. All three screens remain black and white throughout the next section.
Left and right screens show mirror-images of a colony of wild bees tending a large, complex comb. The bare, cellular surface of the comb hangs like an exposed lung on each side of the central screen, where the column of milk re-appears: a spinal axis from which a rotating male torso materialises. In response to the violent flash of a thorn-stem down its centre, the figure displays a Victorian herbal - a book of medicinal plants - open as though for a lesson or demonstration. Finally, the torso de-constitutes back into the stream of milk, which is drawn up, out of the frame. This action takes place to the sound of a clockwork mechanism, and the amplified sound of bees in the comb.
Installation view, Tate Gallery Liverpool
The male-generic human form is qualified. The man is without head, voice, or phallus; the medical book has the status of a cultural fetish, held out as a mask over an attack from within the body, suggesting that the man is not the master of his natural condition, as his intellectual history might suggest.
The theme of correspondences and hierarchies among elements and organic materials is continued in this section, where a burning, gaseous Sun appears in a black sky, behind huge, upturned sunflowers. Soon all three screens are filled with close-up scans of sunspots and solar activity, assembled symmetrically into a section the Sun's sphere. Horizontal 'wipes' trawl down the screen, inexorably renewing the image in a manner which recalls the automatic, indifferent collection of images and data by machines. The soundtrack intensifies: a ritualistic clang of metal objects is subsumed by washes of multi-timbral metallic noise and sharp crackling, directly analogous to the cauldron of wavelengths and frequencies by which solar astronomers today attempt to make sense of the Sun.
Images for this part of the work were supplied by Big Bear Solar Observatory in California, ironically in black and white - visible colour is of little interest to astronomers studying the Sun in terms of radiation of specific wavelengths. False colour was added, and wavelength-scans and other technical data masked out, with the aim of re-investing the image with its iconic, and awe-inspiring status.
The work concludes with a short section showing a series of 'damaged' terrains: a stream of red water running backwards through all three screens; a dried, empty wasps' nest (antithesis of the earlier honeycomb); a burned section of desert (antithesis of the grove of bluebells). Sound is muted: the barely discernible noise of the contaminated stream, wind noise, and grains of sand blown across dry, papery surfaces.
Andrew Stones 1996
Notes:
1. Utriusque Cosmi 1619 - The Science Museum Library, London, Rare Books Collection
2. On April 23 1992 George Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory announced to the American Physical Society that NASAs Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite had mapped temperature differences across 15 billion light years of deep space, explaining the coalescing of matter after the Big Bang. Cosmic origin traced by Martin Walker/Tim Radford and Ripples on the edge of time by Martin Rees: both The Guardian, April 24 1992
3. Witch-Hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy by Brian Easlea. Harvester Press 1980. Pages 145/6
Funding and exhibition details
Commissioned by Video Positive 1993, funded by Moviola
First shown: Tate Gallery Liverpool inVideo Positive 1 - 31 May 1993
With thanks to:
Hal Zirin at Big Bear Solar Observatory, Pasadena CA, USA
Graeme Fyffe - Rare Books Librarian, The Science Museum Library, London
Mark Purcell - installation constructionsSee reviews & press - The Conditions (use sidebar titles)